Category: India

If you didn’t laugh at their cognitive dissonance … you’d laugh anyway

Cognitive dissonance is the gap between reality and what you would prefer reality to be. That gap gets filled with error and blindness when you can’t face up to what’s actually happening in the world. It’s thinking wishfully, with an edge of psychotic unreason. The Trump hysteria among Clinton Democrats and others in the USA (what Scott Adams calls “Trump Derangement Syndrome”) derives from an unwillingness to accept that their candidate was poisonously unpopular, lost the election, and that this is really for real.

The Leftish Naked Capitalism website, usually excellent on many matters, has been simply appalling in its coverage of India under Modi, and this I also put down to cognitive dissonance. It uncritically prints articles by notorious Congress Party frontmen inaccurate in details and wholly ideological in content.

In the previous post I briefly looked ahead to the relationship between India and the UK over the next few decades: it is only going to become deeper and more intertwined to the mutual benefit of both countries.

But India is also in the position now of crafting its own future as a “new” country, as Modi leads it away from retardation after the Congress corruption of the last seven decades. What sort of culture and economy will India follow as part of its growing identity and prosperity? I suggest it will be determined partly by the political realities surrounding India and partly by the artisanal DNA that India possesses and must now cultivate anew and capitalise on.

Let’s cut through all the meretricious nonsense being written about the radical financial and fiscal reform Modi has unleashed.

‘India’s Prime Minister Has Singlehandedly Crushed The Economy With His Reckless Cash Ban’ runs the headline of one of the latest articles condemning the so-called ‘demonetisation’ unleashed by Modi in India. ‘Modi is quickly solidifying his place as one of monetary history’s biggest idiots’ it adds, before going on to display even more staggering ignorance and error than many of the other hundreds of similar articles on this subject have done.

A lot’s happened since Bharatiyata! started half a year ago. Let’s have a quick review of what this is all about …

I started this website back in February and now, just over six months later, I’m going to do a quick upsum to see how far we’ve come, where we’ve got to, what topics we’ve covered and where we’re going. It’s a drawing of breath before moving forward again.

First of all, I haven’t done much over the past month – in fact the work has been mostly behind the scenes as I’ve been ‘SEO-optimising’ the site (mind-numbing work) and bringing various things up to date. At the start I decided I wouldn’t take advertising on here because Bharatiyata! was not created to be a money-making vehicle, at least not in the short-term sense of scraping fractions of pennies from click-throughs. I have zero interest in that model of commerce. I’m trying to be generous with this site and am simply attempting to give information and insight to people who might be interested in those topics. Continue reading “September upsum”

Will the RBI’s new governor be a stalwart and hold the line against inflation as Rajan did?

In three days’ time Urjit Patel will take up his post as the Reserve Bank of India’s new governor. He was previously deputy governor, and his promotion – which had been mooted as influenced by Modi’s old-boys network (Urjit is a Gujurati Patel) – is probably no such thing, as Patel is the eighth deputy governor to be promoted to boss of the RBI. It is a tradition.

India’s imminent Goods and Services Tax (GST) will at last release the brakes of the Indian economy as everywhere else slumps into negativity

This does have to do with India’s GST, so please bear with me for a couple or three paragraphs.

Retail and commercial banks make money on the spread – the difference between the rate at which they charge interest on credit extended (money out – assets) and the rate at which they pay interest on deposits (money in – liabilities). Therein lies the problem with zero or negative interest-rate policies (NIRP, ZIRP) currently decreed by central banks. A bank cannot offer any interest to depositors if – because of ZIRP – its loans are paying anaemic income. Even if a bank receives, say, 2% on credit extended, it will not cover its costs – let alone make enough profits to survive in a competitive market – unless it offers -1% or less on deposits. Many banks, even Deutsche Bank, are already on the point of expiration and this regime will only make financial euthanasia across the industry the norm.

Twelve million young people arrive on India’s job market every year; relentlessly, one million extra souls each month are looking to find work. There are two extreme ways of viewing this situation: either it’s an intractable disaster caused by massive overpopulation that is going to lead to starvation and economic meltdown, or it is the most blessed economic benefit that any country has ever experienced.

Because of its social structure – with large families and an agricultural basis, even now – a good proportion of India’s ceaselessly emergent workforce is simply absorbed into the fabric of the existing economy. The school-leaver will go to the field or behind the counter of the family business. That is not to say such a situation is economically efficient or ideal, or that it is best for a majority of the new workers, whose potential may be wasted in such unambitious occupations, adding only marginally to or even dividing the fortunes of family and country.

Regarding the cynicism expressed about India by Peter Ziehan (see previous post), I was pondering the real-life probabilities of India actually making economic progress beyond the mean of its previous performance. The so-called ‘Hindu rate of growth’ of barely above 1% – often the historical norm under the socialist state planning of the classic Congress/Gandhi-dynasty years –hopefully has disappeared forever. A better rate was jump-started back in the 1990s by the PV Narasimha Rao administration, and then continued by the BJP until they were ousted in 2004. By 2013 Congress had managed to put the brakes back on, but India is now pootling along at +7% growth per annum according to GDP. Granted, GDP’s a terrible measurement as it only counts economic activity, not profitability or productivity. But India’s is the best rate in a bad neighbourhood – the neighbourhood being this planet right now.

I recommend everybody to watch Peter Zeihan here as he delivers a barnstorming illustrated speech on the future of the world. He is a geopolitical analyst who for years worked at Stratfor, known as the ‘private sector CIA’ and has since struck out on his own. He is a great speaker, very funny, knowledgeable, engaging and stimulating.

I should warn that it is very much a Texan’s-eye view, and I am mentioning Zeihan mostly because he mentions India, at 47 minutes in, thusly:

‘The short version on India is that if you’re happy with it today, it’s not going to change a whole lot, the reason being that the Ganges basin is the most productive agricultural zone on the planet in terms of calories per acre per year. That gives you endless population growth. However, there is not a single navigable river in the country. So high populations, no capital. That’s abstract [sic: abject?], total, unending poverty. But India’s looked like this since the fifth century. So if this is an India you can operate in, an India you know and like – great! They are not a major player in Bretton Woods, never have been. They’re not going to change, but if you think India’s about to turn the corner, the whole ‘Shining India’ concept, I’m sorry. It’s looked like this for 1500 years; it’s not about to change.’

Soon enough I hope to remove the question-mark from this series of posts even though that might appear optimistic given India’s track-record of (self-imposed) failures. I’m no Aunt Sally: I am not trying to look on the bright side, nor to poke around for morsels of good news among the gristly stuff. I’m not a Trümmerfrau either, picking among the wreckage and piling up the bricks and masonry strewn around the bombsite to start building an impossible future. I am in fact a hopeful skeptic rather than a pessimist.

For pessimism is an aspect of nihilism and nihilism is an aspect of narcissism, which is itself an aspect of solipsism. India has been subjected to quite enough of that.

India has also been the victim of skewed perceptions since Independence, and has mostly believed what it has been told.

For example, it is difficult to grasp the economic potential and promise of India, partly because in geographic terms it is relatively insignificant, covering much less than half the land mass of the USA or China – which are almost identical in size, at 3,805,927 and 3,705,407 square miles respectively – and only one fifth of the territory of Russia, which is 6,592,800 square miles excluding the Crimea.

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I am Andy Marino, biographer of Narendra Modi, and this site is designed to explain Indian economics and finance, government and politics, culture and history to Western investors, businessmen and entrepreneurs. For more information, click on my Intro section.